The death of business icon Peter Drucker reveals his skinny-dipping

[Ben_m]

I found this interesting: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...8/b3961001.htm

The key part in question being

"Well, boys," he said, "why don't we relax for a few minutes? Let's go for a swim."

The executives explained that they hadn't brought their swimming trunks.

"You don't need swimming suits because it's just men here today," replied Drucker.

"And we took off our clothes and went skinny-dipping in his pool," recalls Charles Ellis, who was with the group.

[Ben_m]

I found this interesting: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...8/b3961001.htm

The key part in question being

quote:

"Well, boys," he said, "why don't we relax for a few minutes? Let's go for a swim."

The executives explained that they hadn't brought their swimming trunks.

"You don't need swimming suits because it's just men here today," replied Drucker.

"And we took off our clothes and went skinny-dipping in his pool," recalls Charles Ellis, who was with the group.

[Sauna]

I think this was discriminating. Why only with boys. Why not with girls?? I have been in sauna naked with female customers from different countries and there is no problem.Usually I have not been the only male. For many of them it has been their first time and very exiting but also very relaxing. To us sauna is a non sexual place.

[florida-david]

sauna - he did not want to get sued for sexual harrassment. It is stupid today that people can claim anything, sue over it, and win millions of dollars. our society is messed up....

[MJ_KC]

To say that our society is messed up is a true understatement. At this point, women executives might sue if they are invited and they might sue if they aren't invited,

[NewbieM]

There's a very famous picture of former FIAT CEO Gianni Agnelli skinny-dipping off the cost of Sardaigna, taken in 1977.

[Trailscout]

I understand the perception, but I would like to add that it is possible to harass women who are clothed with equal facility to those who are nude.

It just makes a few tongues wag when a gent is caught on camera while nude with an equally naked female business associate or client.

I think it is more an issue of being alone with a woman who is not your wife in an intimate setting.

If a large number of people from the office were all nude at a company picnic, would it point the finger at any one employee?

[capers]

quote:

"You don't need swimming suits because it's just men here today," replied Drucker.

And that is exactly why this report is not sexist, if there were women present, he would have said something different - I don't know but having followed Drucker since the late sixties, I consider him to be a most lucid man and if there were women present he obviously would not have made the same comment and may or may not have commended skinnydipping. It is not necessarily a comment upon mixed sex bathing.

I'm a wrinkly and thus my opinion carries no weight but in the fifties, sixties and early seventies, male nudity (at least in Australia) was common. You swam in the nude (in mostly nude areas), you bathed or showered in the nude in shared male toilet areas in convention centres which were nothing like today's five star convention centres and dare I say it, you went into a cubicle in the morning, disposed of bodily waste and then came out and shaved in the altogether with others. And in my experience of those days, all of this in conservative Christian convention sites as well as business conventions.

I see nothing sexist in Drucker's comment. He was a child of his times.